Outsourcing is clearly a growth industry. If we make a call to any service provider it might well be answered by someone in Mumbai or Bangalore. It’ something we all face every day. As we juggle our complex personal lives, we can find ourselves entrusting the care of our children to childminders we sometimes scarcely know.

This outsourcing of responsibility goes much wider. Questions to ministers in Parliament, are often couched in terms of: ‘what is the government going to do about the care of the elderly, the grooming of vulnerable children, hate crime, knife crime, obesity, alcoholism, the dangers of the social media and much else. Over the weekend we had dentists calling for the government to act over an alarming rise in tooth decay in young children often caused by too many sugary drinks. These are complex social issues which can never have a single answer. With the best will in the world, government policy cannot simply make up for the neglect of personal responsibility.

Escaping personal responsibility is nothing new. In the India of Guru Nanak’s day, people would sometimes leave their families to wander in the wilderness in a search for God. The Guru criticised this abandonment of social responsibility and suggested that they go back home and look to the care of their families and wider society.

I was reminded of this while attending the official opening of a new, Sikh ethos school in Leeds recently. Running through the school’s DNA is an underlying ethos, common to many faiths and beliefs, of commitment to personal responsibility and service to those around us.

I was given a tour of the school with the Lord Mayor of Leeds, Councillor Jane Dowson. Brightly coloured posters on the walls, and writing in exercise books, emphasised what I think of as the often missing other 3 Rs: Right, Wrong and Responsibility. The Lord Mayor looked at the list of British Values prominently displayed on one wall, and then at the summary of the essential ethos of Sikh teachings on another, and said they are one and the same! She continued, ‘if only we could get adults to live by such values’. Not easy. But a little less outsourcing of personal responsibility, can have huge benefits for us all.